Arif Zaman

Who is Arif Zaman?

Arif Zaman, Ph.D., is a Pakistani mathematician, an academic scientist and a professor of Statistics and Mathematics. He is the chairman of Department of Mathematics in Lahore University of Management Sciences. Before joining this university in 1994, he also served Statistics Department at Purdue University and Florida State University .

Zaman attended the Harvey Mudd College where he completed his B.S. in Mathematics in 1976. He completed his M.A. Applied Mathematics in 1977, and PhD Statistics from Stanford University in 1981. In his doctoral thesis he studied de Finetti's theorem and its possible turn out in Markov chain. His dissertation was supervised by Persi Diaconis.

Zaman's recent research has been in the field of pseudo-random number generation which is now widely used in modern computing needs. He has also published papers on generalisations of Markov chains, and on using computers to solve various theoretical problems in mathematics and statistics. His publications have been in various journals including: The Annals of Probability, Mathematics of Computation, Journal of Applied Probability, and Journal of Statistical Computation.

He was also allegedly one of the two people involved in creating one of the first rabbit worms that replicated themselves over the local network. This was in the early 1970s while a student in Stanford university.